Teaching Strategy

I never considered myself a particularly good teacher. I tend to ask myself questions and answer them. My students usually cannot follow me because I do not usually tell them what I am aiming at. I've done this for close to fifty years. At some point my students told me to change, I was around twenty years old, i.e. forty years ago. I accommodated and kept going alone. Now I am older and I feel I can produce a more useful peaceful coexistence with my students; without being condescending, more like being useful.

Here I write some thoughts on how to achieve this feat.

First I have to tell myself where am I going with all this searching.

I believe that a new synthesis is coming, our tools have put us in an auspicious situations during this first part of the twenty first century. I am not a singularitarian,  but I do believe that we live in very, very interesting times.

The teaching strategy that I have been following, a little bit unaware of its origins, is one based on a metaphor.

We are building software cocoons, and getting connected to a collective space; some memespace, some memeland. I owned a Personal Digital Assistant, made by HandSping.  I was eagerly waiting for the moment where it could be turned into a computer with telephone characteristics. Then, iPhone happened, and my HandSpring is somewhere in my garage, collecting dust.

My current bet is the iPad2, those are details though; my vision is this:

Edgar Altamirano Carmona: El Docente Conectado

In that document professor Altamirano outlines what he calls the Connected Professor. I myself have taught all my classes here in Chilpancingo, since February 2008, using some kind of Internet helper, for lack of a better name.

Professor Altamirano talks about living on the Internet, some Internet Immersion, like Language Immersion.. I share his views.

The first step of my teaching strategy then, is to become fluent online. I am fluent in Spanish and English, I am working to become fluent in Internet savvy, whatever that means.

I am moving in the direction of being one with the Internet.

That is the first step. The second step is the following:

I have to bring my students along. Professor Altamirano has created a space in facebook, it is here.

In conclusion: We are in the middle of a shift of the human experience, and it goes through digital assistants.

More to come.